soapbox

last night, i glanced away from the guide camera only to notice a HUGE reflection in my glasses. something wicked bright went right through the field. so i saved the resulting spectrum as a jpg so i can share it, because, i think it’s cool. for the uninitiated, the lines horizontally are the spectral lines, and the spectrum from a given object is a column (well, usually several columns together). so the really bright horizontal lines are the night sky lines, and the satellite, being not a point source, is the huge fuzzy column near the middle. red is at the bottom, blue towards the top.

Apparently, those crazy biologist friends of ours were still sussing out how, exactly, bees get their fly on, so to speak.

Fortunately for everyone (except maybe the ID folks), the whole bee issue is now off the table.

Hooray Science! Hooray Responsibility!

just finished my first night of observing. aside from the usual pointing glitch i always encounter on my first night of a run, and the horrible seeing for a couple hours, it went pretty smoothly. i’m staying at the 2.4m for now, so on my way back up from the 1.3m, i noticed i had time to run in to get my camera and catch the sunrise over the mountains way off in the distance, which i’ve never gotten before. as i stood there waiting for the sun to rise, i suddenly saw a flash over the mountains. i saw the green flash! it was so much clearer to me this way that it was in fact green, since i hadn’t been half-blinding myself by watching the sun to see when it had all but disappeared. so i highly recommend, if you should ever find yourself in a place where the horizon is low and far enough away (ocean, mountain tops), do either stay up for sunrise or get up for it once, because the green flash is much more enjoyable in the morning.

i tried to catch a pic of the flash, but i was so surprised to suddenly see it that i don’t think i even had a prayer of catching it. i’ll load the pics onto my computer later and check it out. i might also post of pic of the recent additions to the place. specifically, to the lounge/kitchen area in each observatory.